Kaddish

Summary:

Howard Stark – the senior, not the junior – has his name changed at Ellis Island. He tosses his Yiddish consonants to the sea breeze and never tries to find them again. A century later, Tony Stark lies in a cave in Afghanistan, convinced that this is going to kill him.

Notes:

Work Text:

Howard Stark – the senior, not the junior – has his name changed at Ellis Island. He tosses his Yiddish consonants to the sea breeze and never tries to find them again. It’s 1901, he is ten years old, and he spends his first sweltering summer on the Lower East Side learning English wherever he can. He hawks newspapers for pennies on Sunday mornings, when all the good Catholic boys are in church, and learns to read from the headlines. America is the land of opportunity, and Howard Stark – the elder, not the younger – is making his way.

Forward, there is industry and progress and the battlefields of the Great War. Behind him, there is five-thousand years of human history, a map of persecution that traces bloody lines across Asia and Europe, and a Diaspora the size of a planet. Howard Stark stands at a crossroads, his mother’s old-world lullaby in one ear and telephones ringing in the other. Tomorrow is calling. It is easy to understand which one he picks.

He comes home from battle with a limp, and dreams that give him cold sweats. Goes back to the girl he married before the war and announces that he can’t keep living in a city with no air. It’s 1918, almost 1919. New York City stinks like the ass end of a hog and Howard’s seen cholera and mustard gas and trench foot. He’s got to get out.

They settle in Richford, close enough to Ithaca to be convenient and far enough away that it still feels quaint. It’s John D. Rockefeller’s hometown, and any place that gave rise to the wealthiest man in the country is fortuitous enough for Howard Stark.

When his first son is born, he goes against tradition and names the boy after himself, because Howard Stark (senior, now, finally) has noticed a thing or two about all these successful goyim. They’re all senior, junior, and the third. This is America. You play by America’s rules.

Howard Stark – junior – grows up in an auto garage where his father puts wartime mechanical skills to civilian use. Howard Senior buys the business out from the old owner when his eldest son is eight, almost nine, and Edward is five. Half a year later the market crashes and cars become a luxury their neighbors can scant afford when most people are living hand to mouth. Howard Senior still whistles while he works (when he works), telling his sons, “We are the lucky ones.”

He has seen pogroms and riots and looting. America is full of opportunities for those who take them. He has his wife and his sons and his health, a hip that aches to tell him he is still alive. He casts his vote for Franklin Roosevelt, whose ancestor took office Howard’s first year in America. The New Deal breathes new life into American Industry.

What is good for America is good for Howard Stark – both of him. The senior works and the junior learns, apprenticing at the garage after classes end. He has a natural talent for machines, an innate grasp of how pieces fit together to make a whole. The senior is just a mechanic, but he thinks his son might be more than that. “That boy will be an engineer,” he begins to tell customers. Word spreads through the county – Howard Stark’s got a son who when he fixes cars, they never break again.

Howard Stark Jr. applies to colleges – Cornell because it’s close and Harvard because it’s prestigious, Princeton because he’s a fan of Albert Einstein and thinks the future is quantum, Brown and Yale and Dartmouth and Penn because if you apply to one Ivy then you had might as well apply to all of them. He is rejected, and although no one ever says it out loud, he knows why. Because Howard Stark Jr., with his Ellis Island Anglo name and his success-bound suffix, is still Jewish, and the blood in his veins tells stories about shtetls and Sinai and slavery under the Egyptian sun.

He writes a passionate letter of appeal directly to Einstein, a fellow member of the tribe, and receives a reply that is deeply apologetic and full of righteous fury. In lieu of admission, there’s an invitation for a summer internship, but by that time mustard gas and the horrors of war have caught up to his father. There is a business to run and family to support.

Instead he teaches himself, experimenting and building and applying for patents until finally financers take notice. There’s a war with Germany coming, and America has a thirst for tanks and planes and guns. He learns his machines inside and out, because if you can’t fly it you can’t fix it. He makes his first million building for the US military, and puts it right back into design and construction. Experience teaches that the only safe person to invest in is yourself.

Howard Stark – he’s famous enough to drop the Junior now – wins the SSR contract, beating out a dozen other industrialists including That Goddamn Nazi Henry Ford. Colonel Chester Philips introduces him to Abraham Erskine, genius and soft-spoken, and to Albert Einstein, finally, in the flesh, as brilliant in person as he is in his correspondence. With their whiskery accents and travel-weary eyes, they both remind Howard of his father – men whose journeys began thousands of miles away, who, despite their accomplishments, are still struggling just to belong.

Howard Stark pretends it doesn’t hurt when he finds out that the Nazis’ nickname for him is Roosevelt’s Pet Jew. After the war, when none of the important country clubs will let him join, he writes seven different articles about how he didn’t spend five years and millions of dollars on the war effort just to deal with anti-Semites on American soil. He publishes none of them.

To hear him tell it, he is American-made: a prophet of electricity and steel. In his dreams, he carries his birthright like Moses’s two tablets, offering them up to an absent God. Please, take this, he says. I don’t want it any more. Nothing good ever comes of it. Church bells announce his marriage to Maria Carbonell.

Anthony Edward Stark is born the child of no true religion, denied descent on both sides. He outgrows God when he outgrows the tooth fairy. Science can be proven in ways no mythology can. The periodic table is better liturgy than any psalm King David ever wrote. Machines demand neither Hail Marys nor Hallelujah choruses (though sometimes he indulges in this last one, when he is feeling both accomplished and sarcastic). His half-Italian mother with her full-Italian name makes the world forget that Howard Stark’s parents were Polish Jews who traded their surnames at the gate.

Tony Stark is never turned away from a country club. No Ivy League University ever rejects him because their Jewish quota is full – he doesn’t attend one out of respect for his father’s old grudge, and because MIT appeals to him in ways Harvard never will. No one ever leaves threatening messages painted on his garage door. His windows are never broken.

He never feels kinship with Einstein or Erskine or Oppenheimer.

Sometimes he wonders if he should.

Tony Stark winds up flat on his back in a cave in Afghanistan, a car battery wired to his chest, convinced of two things. First, convinced that this is the moment when his father’s ancestry will finally become relevant. Second, convinced that he is going to die. Miraculously, neither happens. The only jury that will ever really matter unanimously declares Tony Stark a Typical White American Pig.

He wishes his father were here to see what three generations of assimilation hath wrought, Jewish roots buried so deep that even violent fundamentalist terrorists don’t see them to be worth killing him over. He even goes as far as to compare it to ironic button on an Arthur Miller play, though articulating the exact tragedy of the situation is beyond him in this state.

By the end of the week, he has the power of a small star burning inside his chest.

He really just wants a goddamn cheeseburger.

Notes:

Big thanks to -

Prosodi who is actually the world's best beta, despite her protests.Marmolita and Quigonejinn for convincing me to stick with this and helping to hammer out details. Quigone especially wrote a fic about a week or two back that inspired this.Destronomics, even though she doesn't know I was working on this, for coming up with this crazy headcanon scenario in the first place.

Some cultural and translation notes -

Kaddish is a recurring prayer in Jewish liturgy, used to mark transitions between parts of the service, but also recited at lifecycle events and as a sign of mourning.Yiddish is a Germanic language spoken primarily by Jewish populations in central and Eastern Europe.Goyim is the plural of goy. Literally translated it means "nations." In Yiddish colloquial usage (how it is used here), it refers to non-Jews.King David was an ancient ruler of Israel and Judah, dated to around 1000-970 BC. He wrote, like, a lot of psalms.Cheeseburgers are really, really not Kosher (prohibited by traditional Jewish dietary taboos). So. In case you missed it, people who did not have a religious awakening in a cave in Afghanistan: Tony Stark.Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Arthur Miller - All Jewish. Erskine's up for debate.Actual Nazi Sympathizer Henry Ford

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This pings so many feelings, regardless of ethnicity, about assimilating and leaving your history behind. It describes perfectly how three generations born in America rise, and the nadir of racial relations in the US, and the feelings people have about the culture they come from (that you just don't know and can't relate to.) It's just a whole compendium of something that feels like truth, and I want to thank you for writing it.

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Gosh, thank you! :3 I am really glad that you got all that out of this, as it's what I was trying really hard to put into it. I get really stupidly excited whenever my friends write anything at all in this not-quite-AU, so I really, really wanted to try it on for size. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment as well. :D

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This is perfect. Very real. You could very nearly be talking of my husband's family here. (although, since the time line is shifted a bit, his father did attend Harvard, and unfortunately never made as much money as Howard) Right down to the mixed marriages and the non-kosher food. The cheeseburger line is great, even though that in the one place my husband still balks.

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I'm really glad that you think this cleaves to some kind of reality. :) I think what really appeals to me about this generalized interpretation of the Stark family is that it's not very far "out there" from what the actual experience for a lot of families was. Also it was really fun to get to pull from my own background and cultural reference points for a fic for once! Thanks for reading.

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Thanks! It was a lot of fun to figure out the timeline, where these men would have been and why and how different historical events were going to impact them, especially the Pre-WW2 stuff where the MCU canon picks up.

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Coming at this fic, there were two big things I had to somehow justify within the headcanon - that Howard Stark's father is also Howard Stark, and Tony's line in IM1 about wanting a cheeseburger. Once I realized that, it felt very natural to end it there.

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Simply gorgeous. On par with any professional work. I'm left feeling a little raw from all the feelings this gave me; touching, beautifully orchestrated, bittersweet, and funny. All the little touches of culture and language were absolutely perfect, and the story as a whole was so very well-wrought that it's my headcanon for the Starks from now on. Living, breathing artwork here in 1300 words; truly stunning. (And your end notes made me grin a lot.) Thank you for writing this, you did an immensely spectacular job. Bravo. ♥

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some people were talking about your fic on tumblr, so I followed the link a bit nervous about how this was going to be pulled off. but let me say as somebody who is jewish, i loved this. this is all now very much my accepted stark head canon. and the cheeseburger line was brilliant! (4 for you!)

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I'm Jewish, too, and I really indulged in putting bits and pieces of my own family's background/generalized experience into this, since I don't get the chance to draw from it very often in fanfic! I'm glad you enjoyed! (Do you have a link for where this fic was being talked about? :D I love to eavesdrop on discussions of my work.)

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It's interesting you'd say that - I studied anthropology in college and we read a lot of MM's work as sort of the ur-example of how to write an ethnography, and I think I was pulling from that here more than in a lot of my other stories.

Thank you for reading! :D

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I just graduated with a major in cultural anthropology. I think maybe that's why I love your work, we seem to have some shared resonances.

I just noticed that specific example because I did a paper where I compared Mead's generations to assimilate to an American to the generations in a specific fandom of mine. I have a lot of thought about generations of digital natives and the way that technology attitutes propogate.

(Also oh hai I am creeping through your archives now.)

Last Edited Tue01Oct201301:49PMEDT

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Woah, neat! :) I graduated back in May with a double in sort of generalized anthropology and playwriting/screenwriting. (My anthropology major can mostly be described as "will there be Neanderthals on the curriculum? I will take that class," but there was also a lot of core cultural stuff.)